The brutality contained in Poker Face’s 10 episodes is outweighed by humor, humanism, intelligence, and, perhaps most crucially, optimism. “It’s like birds chirping.”Īnd yet, as this week’s season finale culminated with shots of a highway cutting through amber-toned fields, it inspired a counterintuitive feeling: hope in the American dream.
“Everyone, they lie constantly,” she says. The show’s heroine, Charlie Cale (played by Natasha Lyonne), wields an uncanny, possibly mystical talent for detecting bullshit, whether spewed by hotshot race-car drivers or kindly old ladies. Each episode of Peacock’s mystery series depicts such horrors as fratricide and fraud in classic American locales: a Nevada casino, a Texas smokehouse, a Colorado ski lodge. Like a local news broadcast or bit of Russian propaganda, the first season of Poker Face portrays the United States as being infested by liars and murderers.
